Disputation and Obedience

Sects are always in need of heretics to blame, expel and punish. First, fervor takes hold, then rigidity. Righteousness dictates uniformity. Dissent seems dangerous, even treasonous. The spirit hardens: You’re either with us or with the evildoers…Why is the left so determined to eat its own? Sometimes it can be explained as the fervor of fighters determined to root out impurities.

Indeed – and the fervor of fighters determined to root out impurities is a very scary thing. And before I get all righteous, I should note that I probably have a tendency that way myself. Perhaps a strong one. There are quite a few ‘impurities’ that I want, if not to root out, at least to avoid. But then – one of them would be the fervor of people who want to root out impurities and enforce orthodoxy and sanctity and conventional wisdom – so I’m confused. Am I a Puritan or an Impuritan or what?

Well, we all have commitments; I suppose one can have commitments and still not be a furious extirpator of impurities. B&W is obviously for some things and against others; if it weren’t it wouldn’t be B&W, it would be just some random collection of material. B&W has always been about something, so naturally there will be a certain amount of orthodoxy about it – but I hope it falls short of heretic-punishing and evildoer-pointing-at. Though who knows – a former fan of B&W tells me he’s gone off it because he doesn’t like my ‘religion-bashing.’ So clearly that’s one heretic right there.

At least as often, though, the sect becomes inflamed not because it has won but because it has lost. Out of weakness, it imagines treason. As it dwindles, it devotes more of its energies to the urge to purge. It loses patience with arguments about ideas. It is already dead certain of how the world works and needs obedience, not disputation. It develops a taste for scurrilous charges and loyalty oaths. To its own dissenters it says not, “Consider this point,” but, “How dare you?”

And that’s where we get off the train – when there is no patience for arguments about ideas; when obedience replaces disputation. Obedience and submission are not what’s wanted, and the replacement of ‘Consider this point’ with ‘How dare you’ is just the tactic I quarrel with several times a day. ‘How dare you’ is another word for Taboo which is another word for unconditional respect, and they all stink; they all stink of smelly little orthodoxy.

I write this not to complain, but to note and bemoan a widespread disrespect for serious disputation. There’s a lot of this disrespect going around, all over the political spectrum. The confusion of manliness with belligerence does not help. The sound-bite culture does not help. The mixture of insinuation, sneering and yelling practiced by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Chris Matthews and Michael Moore does not help. A president who tells a reporter, “I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation,” and acts on this premise, does not help. Nor does it help when the Bush White House muzzles government scientists who dare report what virtually all their colleagues think about climate change. In claiming that abstention is the best method of preventing sexually transmitted diseases, and that intelligent design deserves to be considered science, the administration enshrines mindlessness rather than rational thought as a governing principle. The sectarian mind is at home everywhere – left, right, you name it. On every front, passion plunges ahead while reason takes its time, cleaning up the mess.

Well, I said B&W was about something, and that’s pretty much what it’s about. One impurity I would like to see a lot less of is this widespread disrespect for serious disputation, and this preference for passion over reason. It just muddies things up.

Seriously, while I heartily agree with all of that, OB, I’ve been spending my spare time lately thinking that what atheists lack is passion.

You know I think, with David Sloan Wilson and others, that religion earns its keep evolutionarily by working as social glue. And when a religion goes from a society, that society still needs social glue. Well, passion seems to be a handy ingredient for making social glue, which of course religion produced in quantity.

And I remember I found myself saying at some point in the last few months that I wish we had a liberal tribe, a tribe which was defined not by blood relations and history but by a shared liberal approach to life (and some history would help). When I feel fire in my belly about a place like Iran, for example, it is with solidarity for my fellow liberals there — people who view life more or less like I do and who want the same things, who I can imagine feeling the same pains I would feel when under the boot of theocracy. Or chicanos trying to lead a normal life in California and are being crushed between the rock of white nativists and the hard place of the Aztlan whackos.

So solidarity is good for a little passion.

A more typical source of passion, however, is something like nationalism – like Aztlan and nativism. But surely they don’t have a monopoly on it.

There’s a song by the Old Crow Medicine Band called We’re All in this Together, which is like a theme song for what I’m talking about. At least the chorus is. I’m not sure how politically reliable they are so I would want to study the words before recommending them wholeheartedly. But then that’s the trouble with passion. It can take you to some strange places if you’re not careful.

They do rock, sometimes. I heard that particular song on a late-night radio program and really liked it but when I looked into them further I pulled back. I still think I would like a copy of that song though.

That is very much the problem, though. When you start getting into the areas people sometimes call “atavistic”, all sorts of stuff starts popping up. And a question that occupies me often is how to have our cake and eat it in this particular situation? How to have the the strong group feelings, the social glue, without what has traditionally been associated with them?

I’ll take a pass on passion, thanks.

| wmr | 2006-04-11 – 18:33:04 |

Do you ever get bored? I mean, how does one live without passion? It seems to me a certain amount of passion is summoned up involuntarily just when you get hungry, even if at no other time! You actually can’t reproduce without passion, I don’t think, at least not without some sort of medical assistance, which would make passion a necessity for life.

That’s the great question – how to have passion without its unfortunate byproducts. That’s part of why I was so galvanized by that bit of Proust the other day: because it touches on that ambivalence. Erotic passion or obsession makes the duality very obvious – how does one have the enthusiasm, the excitement, the energy, the elation, the joy – the passion – without the other side of it: the neediness, the obsessiveness, the dependency, the desperation. It seems to be impossible because they are basically the same thing – the enthusiasm is the neediness. So with other kinds of passion – the devotion is the hatred of traitors or heretics.

That’s why both identity and religion seem worrying to me. I certainly see why people value them, but they seem to me to tip right over into murderous hatreds all too easily – unless they’re diffused and thus defused a little bit.

wmr, I don’t disagree with Gitlin. At least I don’t think so. I agree that there is “a widespread disrespect for serious disputation” and that’s a bad thing. I agree that “On every front, passion plunges ahead while reason takes its time, cleaning up the mess.” And that’s a bad thing.

But I think it is also true that serious disputation requires passion as well as reason.

I would say, much as Ophelia has, that nostalgia for movements for justice in a sense entails a nostalgia for the original injustice, and that is unsettling. But surely it’s not true that the nostalgia for a movement for justice can only be met by reconstructing that movement, complete with the injustice that prompted it. What was worth having in the movement was a sense of identity in a shared commitment to a good cause and the effort to bring it about, and surely that can be had without fighting injustice. Surely that can be had through a purely positive commitment to a project that requires no enemy or evil to bring it into existence.

And, it is to be hoped, fervently so, that it doesn’t require an enemy to keep it going.

I just don’t know how to get there. A commitment to finding/building a set of ideas for leading a good life would seem like a good starting place.

‘a sense of identity in a shared commitment to a good cause and the effort to bring it about’ is a good summary, and it is no less around than it ever was. It might be at a neighbourhood level, or single-issue activism, or something much wider. Sometimes it takes a wrong turn. But it is everywhere you look.

However, the idea of an overarching ideal to unify this impulse? Sometimes history produces one, or we let ourselves believe it has, but always in the form of a Greater to serve or an Other to fight.

‘A commitment to finding/building a set of ideas for leading a good life’. Plenty of people doing that as well, and good luck to them. Come to think of it, a good history of Utopianism might make relaxing summer reading. Anyone know of one?

Sometimes, of course, the Other is well worth the fight, be it facism, slavery or tyranny in all it’s forms. Not so sure about a Greater worth serving, but I’m open to suggestions.

‘identify our enemies accurately and not go overboard with the energy we get from uniting against an enemy’ Couldn’t agree more. The intense complexity of our troubled world makes it essential to take a long hard look at any rallying that’s going on.

It is immaterial to me whether you disagree with Gitlin, or whether you think you do.

My only concern at this point is whether you understood what I wrote and I see no evidence of that.

There is no doubt that shared passion is an extremely effective social glue – look at what it has done for al-Qaeda. But reason and discussion don’t require passion; they require commitment. Passion is kids loving the thrill of it all; commitment is adults doing what has to be done because it has to be done.

I would say the feeling that it has to be done, or at least the feeling that one will do it because it has to be done, is a form of passion. Passion can kill and passion can save lives. Passion can waste time and passion can make excellent use of time. It’s all down to how you use it, but you can’t do without it.

I can’t point to a reference just now but I have seen a convincing presentation of the notion that the human will is driven by emotion and guided by reason, to the point where actual blood and sugar supply to the brain are in certain ways metered by emotions. That makes sense to me.

At any rate, achieving a healthy society must include managing passion and reason, in the same way that achieving a healthy economy requires managing competition and cooperation.

For that reason I’m not interested in slagging off any of those things – passion, reason, competition, cooperation but rather learning more about all of them. And that’s one reason why I consider myself a liberal and seek a framework for achieving balance among different forces.

“achieving a healthy society must include managing passion and reason”

Simon Blackburn has an excellent book called Ruling Passions.

“commitment is adults doing what has to be done because it has to be done”

Until they get tired, or bored, or they have better things to do, or they’re more interested in making money.

It won’t do to try to do without passion altogether. I like to tease people by saying it’s irrational to do so – it’s a tease but I also think it’s true: it’s irrational because it ignores what humans are actually like. We do get bored and tired and selfish and indifferent; motivation does matter; motivation is terribly enfeebled without any passion at all.

Thanks for pointing me toward the book, OB. I see I can search inside of it and browse a bit. I saw a couple of chapter titles that look intriguing and am going to go back and see. (I just finished Why Truth Matters, btw. Quite something!)

“Moving the goalposts” means changing the criteria or changing the subject. As, for example, you do once more when you say, “And I think it’s useless to think about doing away with passion or ignoring it.” No one, particularly myself, said anything about “doing away with passion or ignoring it.” Your original point was to use passion as social glue and that is the point all my comments have been aimed at.

No buts. I thought it was great! I guess the ‘quite something’ meant I found it unique, and that would have been because it actually dealt with things that I have thought about but never seen handled together before. Do you have a place for talking about the book?

Thanks also on Nussbaum. I made a mental note of her name from your most recent post about her. Both these books look very appealing. But I’m not going to buy anything more for a while, until I get caught up.

Most good new books I can’t get in the public libraries in North London. It’s easier with books that originate in the UK so perhaps I could have got wtm from the library. But I didn’t. I wanted to increase your sales figures, too!

As for being vain, well, if you view it as a place to learn from your readers, that’s not vain. That’s how a customer relations manager would talk about it. Take an entreprenurial approach! :)

You say, “And all of mine have been aimed at explaining why I think you won’t get much usable social glue without passion.” I re-read all your comments above and, except for the fact that you find passion to be an element in everything, I couldn’t find where you made any argument that passion is a near-necessity for ‘usable social glue’.

Oh, lordy, I wasn’t suggesting you should have gotten WTM from the library! Perish the thought. But the Blackburn and the Nussbaum.

That’s an odd thing about the public libraries in London – it used to drive me nuts. There’s no one central London one, so the collections aren’t all that complete. Seattle’s a much smaller city but it does have a central library as well as a lot of branches, so it gets some basic stuff (though not nearly as much as I would like).

wmr, I have made my point about the need for passion to hold a society together by pointing out that tribalism, nationalism and religion seem to do it that way, and then I turned my thoughts to what other ways to arouse passions were available which wouldn’t bring with them the potential for exclusionary force that those mentioned have. Ophelia thinks there aren’t any, that the passion is a product, and necessarily a product, of the exclusion or of fighting against something. I’m wondering if it can’t/doesn’t come about in a purely positive context. But at the moment I can’t escape the idea that avoiding negatives is always stronger motivation than achieving positives.

But I have taken your remarks about saying no to passion as a rejection of passion as an ingredient in social cohesion because you found passion to be a bad or inconvenient thing rather than because you think passion does not work well in that regard or works too well. You didn’t speak of limiting or controlling it but of “passing” on it, or doing without it.

I looked back over the thread and it seems to me that where you see me moving goalposts I have seen myself as responding to you. You saw no need for social glue, you saw passion as something frivolous. You weren’t arguing that passion didn’t work to form social glue. So I was responding by talking about the need for passion, even the inevitability of it. And I guess I don’t have much desire to contemplate life without passion.

But if you think social glue is something society needs and if you see a way of having it without having passion, how do you see that happening?

OB, yes, that should work for the Blackburn and Nussbaum books, assuming the Nussbaum is not brand new either. But I’ve got plans to read books that are stacking up on me at the moment so even if the Nussbaum book is brand new my library will probably have it by the time I’m ready to read it. :)

Pointing out how passion has worked to bind societies in the past is not an argument that there is a need for it.

I wouldn’t say that “avoiding negatives is always stronger motivation than achieving positives”, but I would agree that in general avoiding negatives is a more effective governing strategy than achieving positives. This is Popper’s conclusion in Open Society.

I admit that my first comment was so elliptical as to be cryptic, but I thought that the contexts of the two statements would serve to limit my observation to the social arena. I was surprised to find that you interpreted it as a rejection of passion in my personal life. In my second comment, I explicitly pointed to the context and said I agreed with Mr. Gitlin; I hoped this would be sufficient to indicate that I preferred to rely on reason than on passion when trying to bring people together.

I did not see that your comments were responding to mine because I was only talking about passion as an element in a social glue, not in terms of individuals. I see no way to eliminate passion from people or their societies, but I would not rely on passion as the glue to hold a society together. The more passionately an opinion is held by a group, the more severely will dissenters be dealt with. This is too dangerous and it seems to me a good place to start “avoiding negatives”.

I did not argue passion could not work as social glue. In fact, I agreed that passion can do so when I cited al-Qaeda; that was intended to point up the downside of using passion for this purpose.

When I said I would pass on it, I meant that I would not rely on it, not that I would try to do without it, which is impossible. I chose the word “pass” because I liked the look of “a pass on passion”.

As you have said, passion can work for good or bad. The question in the social context is how to make it work for good. IMO the important thing is not to arouse the right passions, but to understand the importance of controlling all passions.

Where did I say that I “saw no need for social glue, [and] saw passion as something frivolous”?

“the need for passion, even the inevitability of it.” I agree that passion is inevitable, but you have not given me any argument for needing it. In the social context, I view passion as a bug, not a feature. Thus, I don’t “see a way of having it without having passion”, but I would emphasize reasoned discussion in preference to impassioned disputation.

I agree that passion is inevitable, but you have not given me any argument for needing it. In the social context, I view passion as a bug, not a feature.

My only argument for needing it is that the social glue that humans have come up with so far seems to make ample use of the sort of passions aroused by religion, nationalism etc. Joint efforts in general seem to lead to social cohesion, though. I’m thinking of things like “barn raisings” in our rural past where there were some things that everybody needed but nobody could provide for themselves without substantial help. So providing common goods can generate social cohesion, I think. But my fantasy of a barn raising (never having participated in one) would include some amount of passion, if nothing else a ‘passion’ to do a good job and get it finished, and there you have a challenge. A party would be called for afterwards, I think, and then you get further into the area of passion.

I would emphasize reasoned discussion in preference to impassioned disputation.

I would emphasize finding the right balance between them. I think what I said about human will being driven by emotions and guided by reason, I would say about groups as well.

Where did I say that I “saw no need for social glue, [and] saw passion as something frivolous”?

I was wrong about seeing no need for social glue. I can’t even find what I thought said that. Sorry about that. Here, though, is something that seems to show what I have been reacting to:

There is no doubt that shared passion is an extremely effective social glue – look at what it has done for al-Qaeda. But reason and discussion don’t require passion; they require commitment. Passion is kids loving the thrill of it all; commitment is adults doing what has to be done because it has to be done.

When it comes to glueing society together, I’ll give passion a pass.

| wmr | 2006-04-12 – 05:04:29 |

This is where I saw you saying passion was something frivolous and so negative and not necessary. And it also shows, I think, the fundamental difference between our ways of looking at this. I would say that commitment requires passion, or even that it is a form of passion. You have to care deeply about something to be commited and that requires passion. Passion is just strong emotions, I would say, and I like them, in moderation. :)

As you have said, passion can work for good or bad. The question in the social context is how to make it work for good. IMO the important thing is not to arouse the right passions, but to understand the importance of controlling all passions.

OK. I find more to agree with here. This statement seems very different from the statement of yours above about discussion not requiring passion, and passion being kids’ thrills, and passion being something counterposed to commitment. I would still say that “controlling all passions” sounds a bit dire. I suppose I like the notion of passions being not quite controllable, something better approached through subtlety and indirection, where you get better results working further upstream. I do recognize, though, that accepting as normal that people will wallow in their passions and do crazy things like kill people indiscriminately is horribly misguided. But rather than think about “controlling all passions” I would tend toward identifying “the right passions” and I wouldn’t hesitate to say some passions are wrong. I think what I call “wallowing in you passions” is a form of escapism which is highly dangerous and we should not be sympathetic to that but rather see it as a symptom of a problem as well as a problematic thing in itself.

When I said I would pass on it, I meant that I would not rely on it, not that I would try to do without it, which is impossible. I chose the word “pass” because I liked the look of “a pass on passion”.

OK. I had taken that as trying to do without it.

I did not argue passion could not work as social glue. In fact, I agreed that passion can do so when I cited al-Qaeda; that was intended to point up the downside of using passion for this purpose.

I know. I said that. I saw you as accepting that passion works as social glue, but rather than making use of it you wanted to make it go away. That seems an area where we disagree. I do want to arouse “good passions”.

I did not see that your comments were responding to mine because I was only talking about passion as an element in a social glue, not in terms of individuals. I see no way to eliminate passion from people or their societies, but I would not rely on passion as the glue to hold a society together. The more passionately an opinion is held by a group, the more severely will dissenters be dealt with. This is too dangerous and it seems to me a good place to start “avoiding negatives”.

What I meant by “avoiding negatives” was group action to avoid some negative outcome, e.g. fighting off starvation, fighting off a warring group, stopping the river from overflowing its banks. You seem to be using it in the sense of not taking an action, deciding to not take an action, which doesn’t have the same effect at all. :) As for “passion as an element in a social glue, not in terms of individuals”, I would point out that individuals, not groups, feel the passions, and ‘passion’ in a group context is entirely a function of the feelings of the individuals. And, as you say, you can’t get rid of them, so it seems to me the only option is to work with them. For what it’s worth, I personally have no desire to get rid of them. When I identify problems with passions, it is, as I mementioned above, with people indulging themselves by wallowing in their passions. But passions are good things, the source of energy, in my view. I’m sorry if I took what you were saying as more than you meant. I do think I see in your remarks a hint of dislike for passion as such, and I was reacting to that. Probably over-reacting, for which I apologize.

I admit that my first comment was so elliptical as to be cryptic, but I thought that the contexts of the two statements would serve to limit my observation to the social arena. I was surprised to find that you interpreted it as a rejection of passion in my personal life. In my second comment, I explicitly pointed to the context and said I agreed with Mr. Gitlin; I hoped this would be sufficient to indicate that I preferred to rely on reason than on passion when trying to bring people together.

Here again, I saw what you were saying as reflecting a general rejection of passion.

I wouldn’t say that “avoiding negatives is always stronger motivation than achieving positives”, but I would agree that in general avoiding negatives is a more effective governing strategy than achieving positives. This is Popper’s conclusion in Open Society.

As above, I was talking about positive action to stop something negative from happening, not refraining from doing something for one or another reason. Or maybe I don’t get your reference to Popper. Can you point me to something (although I only have vol 1 of Open Society in the house)?

Pointing out how passion has worked to bind societies in the past is not an argument that there is a need for it.

No, it only shows that passion does work that way. It doesn’t say that is the only way. How do you see social cohesion emerging or being developed without making use of passion?

humble apologies for the double posting. And of that great long thing. I tried to get the new version of the comments into my window without reloading the main page, which I had closed. The damn thing didn’t warn me that it was about to redo its operation. It’s supposed to! Sorry.

Thanks for your reply, though I think it would have been better if you had gone from top to bottom – that’s the way I wrote it and the way it’s connected.

You appear to need some work on logic and practical reasoning. For example, you say, “My only argument for needing it is that the social glue that humans have come up with so far seems to make ample use of the sort of passions aroused by religion, nationalism etc.” But that is not an argument for its necessity. If, as you said, “And all of mine have been aimed at explaining why I think you won’t get much usable social glue without passion,” then you are not understanding the logical force, or lack thereof, of your statements.

For another example, responding to criticism with “what’s your answer?” is just changing the subject.

Final example: You say, “I would emphasize finding the right balance between them.” This assumes that there is a right balance.

You might also consider a policy of charity in reading: give the author the benefit of the doubt and, when possible, ask questions rather than jumping to conclusions.

Popper gives his views at the end of Vol 2.

I don’t intend to write much more about this because I don’t think there’s much to say – that’s why my first comment was so short. Passion contains dangers as well as benefits; I don’t see any dangers in reason. Passion is inevitable; reason requires hard work. Passion doesn’t need any support; reason needs all the support we can give it.

Reason needs all the support we can give it – but reason tends to lose support rather than gaining it when it seems to come at the price of eliminating passion. Stoicism for example, and much of Benthamist utilitarianism, and autistic versions of economics. Arguments that seem to claim you have to give up passion in order to be rational simply sound like advice to be robotic and Spock-like. It’s not an attractive goal.

Your early comments, yes – I thought that was what you were saying, at least. I haven’t followed the later ones closely, since they appeared to be part of a discussion with Juan whose details I also hadn’t followed.

wmr, You say passion is not needed for social cohesion. I think it probably is. I point out that most if not all social cohesion that we know of uses it, relies on it even. I point out that passion is required for humans to function so it’s not going to go away. It is true that these points do not nail a lid on a box. But they are suggestive. As you are maintaining that passion is not needed for social cohesion, it seems relevant to ask you to say how social cohesion would come about without reliance on passion. I am also actually interested in how you think social cohesion can be built without passion, or even by emphasizing reason at the expense of passion.

Let me start by saying that I have come to suspect the word “passion” because it is too easily subject to equivocation. You use to describe the feeling aroused by a barn raising; it makes me think of al-Qaeda. We need to draw some distinctions within the broad range of meanings.

I did not say that passion is not needed for social cohesion; I said you had not made the case for it. You finally admit that your case is only suggestive. Before you start asserting necessity, you will need more than that.

You say that all the societies we know of use or even rely on it. So what? That is not evidence that it is necessary, only that it is effective. No one will argue that. Or from another perspective, this is only a statistical correlation and you need more to prove cause. The point is that the threshold for arguing necessity is considerably higher.

Why do you say that emphasizing reason would be at the expense of passion. This is not a zero-sum game. Since, as I said, passion is inevitable, I don’t see what can be lost by trying to be more reasonable.

Think of it this way: which way do we have more to gain – by emphasizing reason more that we do or by emphasizing passion more than we do? IMO the drawbacks of passion are clear and reason hasn’t been given much of a chance to show what it can do.

wmr, you’ve talked about taking a pass on passion. You’ve said that when it comes to glueing society together, you’ll give passion a pass. You’ve said discussion doesn’t require passion but — instead of passion — commitment.

Really, now, you’ve thoroughly piqued my curiosity. Please tell me how all that works – what commitment is made of if it is something that exists instead of passion. Tell us how people do what has to be done because it has to be done, without some strong feelings about it having to be done.

OK. You’ve backed away from those things now and you’re saying something like “give reason a chance”, so maybe just tell us how you see social cohesion coming about through emphasizing reason and de-emphasizing reasoon, or just not emphasizing passion, paying attention primarily to reason.

You seem to feel passionately about that, which makes me think you will be able to develop it, at least a bit.

I have already admitted that my first comment was cryptic and stated that what I meant by “pass on” was “I would not rely on it, not that I would try to do without it, which is impossible.” Yet you continue to harp on my admittedly poor choice of words rather than accept my expanded version. Why is that?

I’m not happy with our lack of progress here, so I went back to the beginnning and re-read Urge to Purge, OB’s post, and our first few exchanges, just to refresh myself on how we got started on all this. As I read them, Gitlin and OB are, to condense brutally, complaining about the tendency of groups of like-minded people to split into smaller groups because of passionate feelings about relatively minor but excessively passionate differences.

Reading your first comment in the light of all that has been said on both sides, I have a few questions that might help us to establish more clearly why we are not getting anywhere. You say, “while I heartily agree with all of that, OB, I’ve been spending my spare time lately thinking that what atheists lack is passion.” Based on your later comments, you seem to be saying that atheists cannot make commitments or reproduce. Is that the case?

You go on to say, “You know I think, with David Sloan Wilson and others, that religion earns its keep evolutionarily by working as social glue. And when a religion goes from a society, that society still needs social glue.” Do you think that religion was the only social glue at work in that society?

You then talk about passion being produced by religion, solidarity, and nationalism. Since you later state that passion is a natural part of being human, which I agree with, I would like to know what it is about the passion produced by religion, etc, that makes it more useful as social glue than other passions.

In retrospect, I think it was such unconscious thoughts and difficulties as these that spurred me to make my dissenting comment. If our discussion since then has accomplished nothing else, it has forced me to think through my unconscious reactions so I could put them on the air.

And the looming elephant-in-living-room question behind all that is, is it possible to have emotions that drive people to stick together without the equal and opposite reaction, of driving them away from everyone not inside the sacred circle.

You say, “while I heartily agree with all of that, OB, I’ve been spending my spare time lately thinking that what atheists lack is passion.” Based on your later comments, you seem to be saying that atheists cannot make commitments or reproduce. Is that the case?

Regarding “IMO the important thing is not to arouse the right passions, but to understand the importance of controlling all passions.” I should have rewritten this sentence rather than trying to rescue it with bolding. What I was trying to say was that trying to arouse the right emotions (if such there are) is less useful than understanding that any passion may need to be controlled on occasion. And, IMO, it goes without saying that the controlling can only be done by using reason.

This is not meant to be a complete response to your comment; I’m catching a cold and can’t really concentrate. I just hit the high spots. More later.

You have taken the first part of my supposed position from remarks I made in one context and the second part from remarks I made in another context, thus creating an equivocation that didn’t exist in the original. In that sense, there’s no response to make.

In your first response to my “pass on passion” you say:

Do you ever get bored? I mean, how does one live without passion? It seems to me a certain amount of passion is summoned up involuntarily just when you get hungry, even if at no other time! You actually can’t reproduce without passion, I don’t think, at least not without some sort of medical assistance, which would make passion a necessity for life.

Very interesting about the open source thing, Juan. Very interesting and suggestive model. Funny – there’s a radio program (public radio – either NPR or APR) called ‘Open Source’ – which is pretty good, apart from a sometimes irritating because interruptive host. And a couple of radio interviews that have long stuck in my mind were essentially about open source – one with the guy who did Linux, the other with a genome person who insisted on keeping it public and open as opposed to patented and secret and for profit. Inspiring stuff.

As we were just talking about this sort of thing (open source, public goods) I thought I would leave this here from Lawrence Lessig’s blog. The sub-title of the book is what drew my attention in this context: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Color me surprised. If you re-read Mr. Golbaldo’s first comment, you will find that “what atheists lack is passion.”

The substance of this is laid out in his second comment: “Do you ever get bored? I mean, how does one live without passion? It seems to me a certain amount of passion is summoned up involuntarily just when you get hungry, even if at no other time! You actually can’t reproduce without passion, I don’t think, at least not without some sort of medical assistance, which would make passion a necessity for life.”

wmr, I’m sorry, but you’re just misreading. Juan is talking about a general issue – Daniel Dennett talked about the same thing on ‘Start the Week’ or ‘Nightwaves’ or one of those BBC gigs he did. And Juan’s comments are discursive, raising questions, suggesting problems; he’s not saying all atheists are cold fish.

I agree with him about the issue! Religion has attractions that non-religion (not surprisingly) doesn’t have. The B-Minor Mass isn’t about atheism. I don’t take that fact personally.

Perhaps not, but he jumped to that conclusion regarding me, and on no better evidence than a 7 word throwaway remark. Perhaps I have read his comments with a jaundiced eye after being misread myself, but I found them full of strawmen and bad arguments.

To refuse to continue to talk to Juan and then to moan about him to OB is the height of bad manners.

OB

Back in an early e-mail in this strand you mentioned London libraries. When I lived there it was the case that if you joined one your ticket was valid at all the rest. Also there is a common catalogue, so even if the book you want isn’t available at your local branch they can get it for you – usually quite quickly unless someone has wandered off with the only copy!

Chris – ah, right, I’m out of date (not surprisingly). When I lived there your ticket was not valid at all the others, it was valid only within whatever council issued it. Haringey wasn’t good in Camden and vice versa; Kensington and Chelsea knew not Camden; and so on. Ridiculous system. I’m glad they’ve fixed it.

It’s kind of another open source issue, really. Libraries are the first open source institution, and they ought to operate as openly and rationally as possible. (Also as quietly, but that’s another subject.)

What I said was that I had lost interest in what Mr Golblado had to say. I did not go into greater detail because, as I mentioned in an earlier comment, I was struggling with a bad cold. In fact, I finally realized that Mr. Golblado had earlier done to me exactly what OB said I was doing to him – misreading and mixing contexts – and I had simply lost patience with his inadequacies.

You may verify this for yourself by reading our first few exchanges and asking whether his first response to me was appropriate. If I misconstrued his contexts in arguing to OB that he was insulting atheists, then he had clearly dragged my comment from the first context into the second without acknowledgement. For myself, I regard that as worse than bad manners – it is bad logic and bad argument.

My library ticket is valid at all of the borough’s libraries but not in other boroughs. The only catalogue I have access to is the borough’s catalogue, and not London-wide. But they do get books from that catalogue (i.e. from any borough libraries) for you and usually quite quickly. Actually, they have more than I had expected when I started looking. But of course they don’t have everything one wants.